Displaying Data from Twitter in Alpha Anywhere- with OAuth Authorization in order to call the API functions

Displaying Data From Twitter in the Alpha Anywhere List Control

The Twitter API returns data in JSON format. The Alpha Anywhere List control on a UX component is easily populated with JSON data.

The Twitter API, however, is a little tricky to work with because it requires an OAuth authorization before you can call the API functions.

Xbasic contains two new built-in functions that simplify this.In this example we show how you can easily build a List control that displays Tweets that are retrieved by making a REST API call to Twitter.

In the example we use built-in Xbasic functions to get a 'bearer token' from Twitter.Once we have this token, we can make calls to the Twitter API to get data in a JSON format that is used to populate the List control.

About Author

Richard Rabins

Co-founder of Alpha Software, Richard Rabins focuses on strategy, sales, and marketing. Richard also served as CEO of SoftQuad International from 1997 to 2001, when it owned Alpha. In addition to his 30 years with the company, Richard played a key role as co-founder, and served as president and chairman of the Massachusetts Software Council (now the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council), the largest technology trade organization in Massachusetts. Prior to founding Alpha, Richard was a project leader and consultant with Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), and a management consultant with Management Decision Systems, Inc. Richard holds a master's degree in system dynamics from the Sloan School at MIT, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and master's degree in control engineering from University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has served on the boards of Silent Systems, Legacy Technology and O3B Networks, and is co-founder of Tubifi www.tubifi.com.